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FRI, 30 MAR 2001 01:31:41 GMT

Slovenia and Minorities

SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN THE OTHERS

Now that the Slovenian ethnic minority in Italy, after decades of
struggling in the Senate, has finally secured for itself a special law
(after which it can no longer be considered as discriminated against, as
opposed to other, protected minorities), and when the small German
minority in Slovenia (through a so-called "cultural agreement" with
Austria) has been granted special protection -- the uneven position of
minorities in Slovenia attracts great attention. This is primarily the
case with discrimination against unrecognized minorities.

AIM Ljubljana, March 23, 2001

Slovenian legislation protects three minorities -- Hungarians,
Italians and (partly) Roma. The first two groups are protected by the
Constitution and laws. They have a guaranteed right to education in
their native languages, their news media are entitled to financial
support, their languages are in official use in local government, they
can widely use their national symbols and are issued bilingual personal
documents. Every member of these two groups has a dual voting right: in
addition to being able to choose candidates from national
tickets, these two minorities have two seats guaranteed by the
Constitution, regardless of the changing number of ethnic Hungarians and
Italians.

Such protection of (privileged) minorities even in international terms
is even more conspicuous when compared with the position of other, much
more numerous ethnic minorities which enjoy no rights in Slovenia and
are far from any "positive" discrimination. According to the latest,
1991 census, in addition to the Slovenians, the country had
53,688 Croats (2.74 percent), 47,097 Serbs (2.4 percent), 26,725 Muslims
(1.36 percent), 12,237 Yugoslavs (0.62 percent), 8,499 Hungarians (0.43
percent), 4,233 Montenegrins (0.22 percent), 4,412 Macedonians (0.22
percent), 3,558 Albanians (0.18 percent), 3,063 Italians (0.16 percent),
2,282 Roma (0.12 percent), 546 Germans (0.03 percent), 322 Czechs (0.02
percent), and an even smaller number of others.

Most Slovenian politicians and experts in "minority issues," who almost
without exception are paid by the state, will respond, when told that
according to the census, certain minorities are more numerous that those
protected by the Constitution, by saying that numbers do not mean
anything per se, and that other factors should be taken into
consideration, such as, for example, their compactness, being
"indigenous," etc. These explanations, however, are faulty even from the
perspective of Slovenian "minority policies" themselves. And for two
reasons at that.

First of all because "being indigenous" as a criterion, according to
international definitions, is not a condition for recognition and
respect of the rights of a certain ethnic minority. According to all
such definitions, "lasting or prolonged ties" of a minority with its
home country is the chief condition. As far as the expert definitions
go, ties existing for only two generations suffice for this purpose.
The other reason is that to certain unrecognized minorities in
Slovenia -- Croats, Serbs, and Germans, for example, indigenousness
cannot be denied. Serbs appeared in the territory of the so-called Bela
Krajina (White Frontier) as early as 1530, and permanently settled there
in 1593. Soon, several Serb settlements appeared on this region's
borders -- Bojanci, Marindol, Paunovic, Adlesic, Zunic, and others. In
Austria-Hungary, Bojanci, for example, were granted the status of a
parish, and between 1880 and the mid-1960s, a Serb
elementary school existed there. During the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes (between the two World Wars), 6,745 Orthodox Christians, mostly
Serbs and Montenegrins, lived in Slovenia.

Even before the great migrations, at the beginning of the 1850s 11,225
Serbs and 1,365 Montenegrins lived in Slovenia. The Slovenian Central
Committee of the Alliance of Communists, for instance, used to describe
as "destructive" the demands of the Serb ethnic community for the right
to education in their maternal tongue and the preservation of the
cultural tradition of Bela Krajina. That there were locations in
Slovenia where Serbs were the indigenous population was also shown by
numerous newspaper articles which until the 1990s frequently
tackled this phenomenon. Thus for instance, under the title "Bela
Krajina Serbs Do Not Feel Threatened," the newspaper Delo in its issue
of Oct. 16, 1990, reported on a visit paid to the Bela Krajina Serb
community by Slovenian Presidency President Milan Kucan and a member of
this body, Dusan Plut. A little later the same newspaper reported on the
results of a plebiscite in Slovenia. "Bela Krajina Serbs firmly back
independent Slovenia -- the fact that most of them voted in favor of
independence means that the Serbs in Bojanci will peacefully coexist
with their Slovenian neighbors in the future," said Delo.

Eleven years later, Serbs can hardly be found in Bela Krajina. As far as
education goes, Prezihov Voranc Elementary School, which was the only
one in Slovenia to offer courses in the Serbo-Croatian language, in
1992, acting on a decision of the municipal assembly, began to gradually
eliminate these courses. The last classes were disbanded in 1998. One of
the arguments used then was that the courses were unnecessary because it
was a "(former) Yugoslav privilege." The other
maintained that it was not proper to organize courses in
Serbo-Croatian for pupils "who have mostly been granted Slovenian
citizenship."

The situation with the Croat and German ethnic minorities is more or
less the same. That members of the German minority have deep and lasting
roots in Slovenia is an undisputed historical fact. Its problem lies in
its small numbers. This, however, is not the case with the Croat
minority. Although Croats arrived in Slovenia as part of three large
migratory waves, in various areas on Slovenia's southern borders live
several thousand Croats indigenous to the region. In addition, the
border between Croatia and Slovenia is not as homogeneous as it appears
at first glance. Surveys conducted by the
Slovenian Institute for Minority Issues have shown that on the border
with Croatia, there are 18,657 Croats and 7,320 Serbs, whereas on the
Croatian side there are 14,580 Slovenians.

Finally, it is not difficult to conclude that at the time it declared
its independence Slovenia should have protected at least the three
aforementioned ethnic communities, if it wanted consistency in its
implementation of the "indigenousness" factor. The fact that it did not
do so is due to a lack of an internationally valid definition of
minority. Because international standards pertaining to minorities are
deficient, minority rights primarily depend on each individual
country, and in defining them a dominant role is played by political
elements.

Strong countries can ensure better protection for their nationals living
elsewhere. Where there is no state (the case of the Roma or the Kurds,
for instance), protection is poor, or does not exist. The results are
quite obvious -- some states are affected by strong waves of separatism,
and in others, ethnic minorities are gradually assimilated. The case of
Slovenia shows that even good protection of some ethnic groups does not
exclude discrimination against others, even by the state itself.